Senate Republicans are privately hoping that President Donald Trump will lose his fight in court to strike down the Affordable Care Act, because if he wins then Congress won’t be able to pass something to replace Obamacare, which will hurt the GOP in the next election, The Hill reported on Monday.
“If you’re looking strictly at political outcomes, it could be argued that a lot of members don’t want to see this struck down because they don’t want to deal with the fallout,” a senior Republican senator said.
The GOP concerns come after the Trump administration announced it is asking an appeals court to affirm a lower court’s ruling that Obamacare is unconstitutional, which is a change in tactics after it initially argued that the courts should only invalidate parts of the law.
Trump last week vowed that "If the Supreme Court rules that Obamacare is out, we will have a plan that is far better than Obamacare," according to Politico.
But another GOP senator told The Hill that “If they were really working to build something that had legs, you would have thought there were some conversations prior to Tuesday and there were none,” with some Republicans saying that Trump did not fully think through his strategy before announcing last Tuesday that the "Republican Party will soon be known as the party of health care.”
GOP senators have described Trump’s decision as especially reckless as the country is already in an election cycle and that every Republican “was caught flatfooted,” by the move, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who “had no idea” it was coming.
© 2023 Newsmax. All rights reserved.